24 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

everyone laughed at him about the fever, and one
could tell that he was a little scared; but one could
tell too that it was not going to make any difference.
He was like an old fighter who is forced back into the
ring because he needs the purse; he may be out of
condition, may be afraid of getting hurt, but he
cannot afford to lose, even if the effort kills him.
Younger talked about his wife; he had never before
been to a place where he couldn't ring her up at
nine o'clock of an evening; he'd always done it when
he was in Brussels, in Berlin, in Warsaw.

Graveyard

The day after Las Palmas, passengers in West Coast
boats wake to a completely new air. It lasts for a
day and a day only. My sheets were damp with a
kind of dew; there was a warm wet wind and a haze
bver the sea. The air smelt as salt and fishy as the air
on Brighton front. The sodden damp to a traveller
back from the Coast with malarial infection in his
blood is said to be very dangerous, and among sailors
this part of the Atlantic is known as the Elder
Dempster Graveyard. But the tradition is older than
the Line. Burton wrote of it in his Anatomy: "Such
a complaint I read of those islands of Cape Verde,
fourteen degrees from the Equator, they do male
audire; one calls them the unhealthiest clime of the
world, for fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which
commonly seize on seafaring men that touch at them,
and all by reason of a hot distemperature of the air.
The hardiest men are offended with the heat, and
stiffest clowns cannot resist it."